


sorry the blood in your mouth isn't mine

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-07-03
Packaged: 2017-11-09 03:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock loves his violin and loves John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sorry the blood in your mouth isn't mine

**Author's Note:**

> Little Beast by Richard Siken, for Party When Dead.

i. Sherlock Holmes is at an all-night barbecue, has been dragged there by John, and there is the magenta radio blasting a tune he doesn’t know. He itches for his violin, the feeling of strings cutting into his fingers, making them stronger than they were before.

The tune yells what everyone is thinking, no applause or dressing up, simply of love and anger and all that is wrong and right. It yells of stabbing the crowds to death, of leaving them to bleed in an alleyway, and then looking at it anew, a work of art. He’d dump it in a dumpster after that, after a polluted kiss to one’s lips. It’s a nice touch, whisky kisses on the corpse’s lips. 

And tonight, Moriarty is carving his name into his ex lover’s, now deceased, face. Sherlock wants to be him, his hands no longer an afterthought, but a deliberate movement, like the broad stroke of a bow over strings. Moriarty has complete control over his body. Sherlock wonders what it would be like.

ii. Lestrade had told him that explaining was an admission of failure. Sherlock’s mind flits to a crime scene, to everyone so vacant. To explaining the blood stains on the wall, and the traces of arsenic. Sherlock thinks of contemplating poisoning the victim left standing. It would have been a prettier ending. He had been on the phone with John. Perhaps he remembers

iii. Irene is grinning, a smirk that cuts into his back like her whip, like the sharp high note he hits on his violin. His hands are still itching. History repeats itself, someone says it, but Sherlock can’t tell who. Their voice is smooth, but it breaks.

There is a shadow over him, a legacy that doesn’t exist, but he can’t shake it all the same. Sherlock is outside a crime scene, is trying to describe what he cannot know, and his mind is still focused on that damned quote. He lists through names, but never finds a Sherlock Holmes, a John Watson. There must always be a first though he wishes it weren’t them.

iv. John had dark eyes, and Sherlock had wanted to sleep with him. It was the same lust he feels for the music that pores out of his skin. John’s stance, the way he held himself with a presence, as if he was something, was intoxicating. Everyone could watch his muscles moving underneath the thin skin. Sherlock thinks they must have looked like animals, bones barely fitting beneath the skin, too much to hold in.

Sherlock wanted to take him home and rough him up, pulling at his strings, working him until exhaustion hits. He wanted to be wanted, and John was so beautiful, with his wild eyes locked on the exits. He could have drowned in Sherlock and perhaps, Sherlock would have let him.

It’s summer and so it’s suicide, and Sherlock is drowning in vices, in music, in crime, in sex. He’s helpless, being held underwater by a force he cannot tell. He still struggles.

v. Sherlock didn’t see. Not until he had passed the middle of it, which is odd for him, his brain is all he can count on these days. Sometimes he can’t even count on that. He only realized then, that the itch for music, the one he had slipped under his skin, replaced with John, had not left. It had dug deeper, into his heart. He’d had to stitch it back together, unwittingly tying it closer to himself.

John was covered in scars that made his skin heal thicker. They look like train tracks up and down his body, and Sherlock wants to eat him. He wants to lick down John’s arm and know exactly where each scar came from.

Sherlock sees their faces in a mirror, in a shop window, and doesn’t recognize them. These people have locked eyes, tight lips. They are waiting for something, but Sherlock doesn’t know what. 

vi. They grope each other in the backs of cars that do not belong to them. The breaking in is the best part, a high that cannot be reached any other way. It’s winter now, and ice paves the walks, grass is frozen. The frozen air stills around them as they pick the lock, and run in. But Sherlock, despite the highs, finds he cannot sleep, and John is running out of stories to tell.

Sherlock has never found anything sexier, than John, with a gun in one hand, a fast car underneath his feet, and a bottle of pills in his pocket. It falls on sherlock’s head, that they will die like this. In perpetual debt to each other. A mess of tangled limbs and poison. Sherlock thinks of the music, the strings that will play out his death and smiles. John smiles back.

vii. John asks him what he wants, and Sherlock thinks. He wants his money’s worth, though he can’t say that, won’t say that. He wants his violin’s strings and John’s heart, he wants a bottle of pills. Pills that can kill, fast. He wants John’s gun against his head, a solemn weight of his life in John’s palm.

How do you explain a life spent crawling, always searching, with blood in your mouth and glass cutting into your feet? They swallow mud, and come back for more. There is blood on John’s fists, from where he punched Moriarty. Sherlock still wants Moriarty’s hands, wants his control over himself, but he will take pleasure in his pain. 

They pull their coats and boots on with two hands, the blood catching on Sherlock’s buttons. They still can’t punch themselves awake, no matter how hard they try, bruises spreading across their faces, like viruses.

John looks heartbroken and dead and all Sherlock can say is 

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.” but he can’t even say that. 

He can’t get John to kill him, but John will wear his jacket until the day he dies..


End file.
